Sunday, September 20, 2015

Not the whiskey. Whoever wrote that nice review for Amazon. Reposting the review with gratitude:

It's likely that only Stan Goff could have written this book - and thank
God that he did. Reading through the some 400 pages of Borderline is
akin to sitting with your doctor as she relays diagnosis after diagnosis
of your sick and failing body. The pages are often jarring and
unsettling, disclosing secrets you'd rather remain blind to, yet they
are desperately needed and therapeutic - even if the therapy is painful.
Whenever someone committed to the church and its Lord exposes the ways
the church has failed to be faithful to God's gracious Word, we ought to
humbly receive this chastisement as the merciful discipline of God. To
confess Christ as Lord is to stand under his judgment, which, as Rowan
Williams puts it, is to receive the truth "about us as human beings
implicated in a network of violence and denial" (OCT, 81).

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Muscle dysmorphiaJot that down. Another excellent example of how the radical medical monopoly - with psychiatrists now as our priests - uses naming to achieve its power. An improvement, we might suppose, over the Adonis complex, what this so-called personal "disorder" used to be named in our post-Freudian period. At least the language of the psychiatrists has made space for the non-Adonis women who exhibit the same behaviors described for men in this diagnosis.

But the pathology is not individual. It is cultural; and this complex or disorder is, in fact, a symptom of that cultural pathology, this indeed very sick social order.

Thursday, September 10, 2015

Monsignor Ivan Ilich's phatic outburst: "To hell with the future. It is a man-eating idol."

What's in the future is death. At least part of it. On my mind lately. People I love are sick or dying. It's not a unique situation. This is what getting older is, apart from the more self-involved stuff we notice about our declining personal vigor and and fading good looks. Time, in this world, will always bring loss. Life, in a broken world, is often loss.